See, Daniel’s father, her grandpa Walt, was still living, out on the same little farm. After she read about the red box she drove straight out there that same night and made the poor old man unlock the shed.

And there it was. Back behind the paint cans and the busted lawn mower, on a high shelf, a red metal box with a layer of dust on it you could write your name in. It had been sitting there twenty years. Grandpa Walt didn’t even know what was in it. Daniel had made him swear, before he passed, to just keep it safe and never let anyone touch it.

Emily said there was a note taped to the lid, in that same leaning handwriting. And the note explained why he’d hidden it way out there instead of leaving it in the house. He wrote that he didn’t want her mama to find it, not before Emily turned eighteen. He was scared if his wife found it too soon, while she was still raw and grieving, she’d hold onto it like a rope and never let go. He wanted her to have room to heal. To maybe love again. He said, “I’d rather she live than spend her life sitting next to this box waiting for me.”

And then Emily told me what was inside, and I have not been the same since.

It wasn’t money. It wasn’t a ring or a savings bond or anything like that. It was a little handheld tape recorder, the old kind, with one cassette in it. Daniel had recorded himself. His voice. Emily said her hands were shaking so bad she could barely push the button. And when she did, there he was.

Talking to her, calling her his baby girl even though he never knew if she was a boy or a girl. Telling her about the ultrasound and her little fingers. And then, right at the end, he sang her a lullaby.

Off-key. Cracking. Just like he warned her in the letter. The man couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and he knew it, and he sang anyway, for a daughter he’d never get to rock to sleep.

Emily said she’s played it every single night since. She said she didn’t know she’d been missing his voice her whole life until the second she finally heard it.

After we hung up I sat at my kitchen table for the longest time. I was happy for her, I truly was. But I’ll tell you the honest, ugly truth of it. I was jealous. I sat there with Harold’s old copy of To Kill a Mockingbird in my lap, the one that started this whole thing, and I cried like a baby. Because forty-one years I had that man, and I have his reading glasses and his ratty fishing hat and a closet of his shirts I can’t give away. But I don’t have his voice. Not anywhere. Not on a single tape.